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Mint

I changed banks for this website – www.mint.com. I think everybody should use it.

I’ve always been rather careful about how much money I have and how much I’ve spent. I would usually check my bank and credit accounts every few days and I knew my networth within a few hundered dollars at any given moment. I got my need for close money management from my mum, I suppose. As a kid, I used to watch her write down her expenses in a notebook that she kept in her cuppboard. Her’s was nothing fancy, just a list of how much was spent and what the expense was on. When I moved to the US in September 2001, and was for the first time responsible for my own money, I started to do the same. Every dollar I spent was documented in a little diary. It slowly evolved into calculating my weekly expenditures and bank balance, but for nearly two years it was all hand-written. I experimented with various Excel spreadsheets with complicated forumals in cells, but that never quite satisfied what I was looking for. I was suggested Quicken and MS Money, but then never quite appealed to me (I think amount of manual work required for software that was supposed to automate something, irked me.) Some years ago, I stopped keeping track of money manually and resorted to checking bank and credit card accounts almost daily. When I was a student and didn’t have much income, or resources, this was easy enough. As I moved out into the professional world, this became somewhat harder with regular income and tons of expenses. Adding to this was the complication of several credit accounts. Nonetheless, at any given moment, I could reasonably estimate what I had in which account.

To someone like me, Mint is a boon. I’m sorely dissapointed that it is a US-only tool at this time. For now, I’m here and I’m enjoying it.